Open Source Go Packet Sniffers

Skydive is an open source real-time network topology and protocols analyzer providing a comprehensive way of understanding what is happening in your network infrastructure. Captures network topology, interface, bridge, and namespace attributes and keeps the history of all the modifications. Distributed probe, L2-L4 classifier, GRE, VXLAN, GENEVE, MPLS/GRE, MPLS/UDP tunneling support. Ability to follow a flow along a path in the topology. Support for external SDN Controllers or container-based infrastructure, OpenStack, OpenContrail, Docker. Supports extensions through API. Distributed, scalable, easy to deploy, only one static binary.

Netgraph is a packet sniffer tool that captures all HTTP requests/responses, and displays them in a web page. You can run Netgraph in your Linux server without a desktop environment installed, and monitor HTTP requests/responses in your laptop's browser.

Deepfence PacketStreamer is a high-performance remote packet capture and collection tool. It is used by Deepfence's ThreatStryker security observability platform to gather network traffic on demand from cloud workloads for forensic analysis. PacketStreamer sensors are started on the target servers. Sensors capture traffic, apply filters, and then stream the traffic to a central receiver. Traffic streams may be compressed and/or encrypted using TLS. The PacketStreamer receiver accepts PacketStreamer streams from multiple remote sensors and writes the packets to a local pcap capture file. PacketStreamer sensors collect raw network packets on remote hosts. It selects packets to capture using a BPF filter, and forwards them to a central receiver process where they are written in pcap format. Sensors are very lightweight and impose little performance impact on the remote hosts. PacketStreamer sensors can be run on bare-metal servers, on Docker hosts, and on Kubernetes nodes.

Package github /asavie/xdp allows one to use XDP sockets from the Go programming language. With the default UDP payload size of 1400 bytes, running on Linux kernel 5.1.20, on a tg3 (so no native XDP support) gigabit NIC, sendudp does around 980 Mb/s, so practically line rate. TL;DR: in the same environment, sending a pre-generated DNS query using an ordinary UDP socket yield around 30 MiB/s whereas sending it using the senddnsqueries example program yields around 77 MiB/s. Connecting a PC with Intel Core i7-7700 CPU running Linux kernel 5.0.17 and igb driver to a laptop with Intel Core i7-5600U CPU running Linux kernel 5.0.9 with e1000e with a cat 5E gigabit ethernet cable.